


No Fortress Against Her Remains

by jibrailis



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-16
Updated: 2010-08-16
Packaged: 2017-10-11 03:19:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/107765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jibrailis/pseuds/jibrailis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mal teaches young Arthur everything he knows about the trade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Fortress Against Her Remains

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://community.livejournal.com/inception_kink/5987.html?thread=9016419#t9016419) on the kink meme.

When Arthur is twelve, his family moves to Paris. His father, who reads Baudelaire and Camus and uses Proust to hoist his pillow, waxes romantic about the move. Arthur's mother is more pragmatic and wonders about the difficulties of navigating France when her French is mediocre and her son's even more so. Arthur takes French lessons and is inundated with French tapes before they leave San Francisco; his father haunts the French section of their local independent bookstore until the owners complain about his creepiness.

On his last day of school, he says goodbye to his best friend Yichang and bites his lip when he says an off-the-cuff "bye" to Jenny, whose braids are wrapped in blue ribbon. She doesn't look up from her bike.

"Girls," huffs Yichang. "When you come back, you'll be French. They'll be all over you, man!"

"Yeah right," says Arthur, and doesn't say what he secretly knows: that he's never coming back.

 

* * *

 

Paris is big and weird, and maybe it has some famous art and nice buildings, but Arthur is _twelve_. He'd rather be playing Super Mario World.

His parents enroll him in an English academy. For the most part, it's okay. The kids there are from all around the world, which is interesting but also frustrating sometimes, because no one is quite like Yichang with his Californian accent, or like Jenny, who used to lick all the jelly off her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches -- when Arthur asked her why she didn't eat them both together, she stared at him like he was dumb. He still doesn't know why.

His mother learns to love Paris though, or maybe that's just because his dad, emboldened by the Frenchness of it all, has started to woo her all over again. Arthur wanders into the living room sometimes, looking for a book, and sees his parents cuddling on the couch over a bottle of wine. It's pretty disgusting, but even at twelve Arthur is discreet. He saves the gagging for when he's alone.

His dad brings home bread and cheese on his way home from work, and one day he also brings home a seventeen-year-old girl with short brown hair and a plaid skirt. 

"This is Mal," he says. "She's the daughter of Dr. Barrineau, who teaches in the architecture department with me. She's going to babysit you tonight, Arthur, while you and I, love," he adds to Arthur's mother, "are going out on the town."

Arthur's mother laughs.

Arthur scowls. He hates that word, babysit. 

Mal looks supremely bored.

Arthur narrows his eyes at her when his parents leave the room, whispering conspiratorially about what show they're going to see at what time.

"Do you speak English?" he asks.

"Yes," says Mal.

"Okay then," says Arthur. He sits stiffly on the couch and goes back to watching TV, though it's more a pretense than anything else because his French still isn't good enough to understand any of the shows, even the really baby ones. But strangers make Arthur nervous and girl strangers doubly so. He thinks about going to his room and closing the door, but his parents would probably yell at him if they found out he did that. He wasn't raised to be rude.

Mal sits beside him. She pulls out a book. He peeks at the title: _Notre Dame des Fleurs._

His parents kiss him on the way out. Arthur suffers through it embarrassingly. "Don't give Mal too much trouble," his father laughs. "She's only doing this as a favour, you know. She doesn't need any of your backtalk."  
_  
_Mal smiles slightly. Arthur folds his arms across his chest. When his parents leave, there's just the whine of the TV to break the silence and Arthur, to prove that he doesn't need anyone taking care of him, finally slides off the couch and says, "Do you want anything to eat? I can make dinner."

"Really?" Mal asks skeptically.

"Yeah, I cook all the time," Arthur lies.

"Go ahead then," says Mal, and watches him with an amused expression. Arthur goes into the kitchen and takes out a package of pasta. He starts boiling water on the stove. Every now and then he glances over at Mal, but most of the time she's reading her book. Her fingers are long and spindly when she turns the pages; she licks her index finger occasionally before placing it on the yellowing paper.

Arthur burns the pasta.

 

* * *

 

The second time Mal comes over to babysit, he's prepared. He's practiced making pasta with his mother so he knows how to do it right this time. He waits for the fanfare when he serves Mal at the table, but Mal just laughs and reaches for a fork. Arthur tries not to be overly annoyed. Back home Yichang's mom was always impressed when Arthur helped her in the kitchen. Maybe in France it's different. Maybe everybody knows how to cook here.

Mal does the dishes, and Arthur finishes his math homework. He doesn't have any difficulty with it -- schoolwork has never been one of Arthur's weaknesses -- but Mal leans over halfway through and laughs again.

"What?" he asks.

"Is that really what they're teaching these days?"

Arthur is ten kinds of offended. The school he goes to is one of the best in France. They're not _stupid_ there. But Mal takes the pencil out of his grip, leaning close enough that he can smell the dish soap and ginger on her skin. "Do you know what a Cartesian plane is?" she asks.

"Yeah," he says.

She draws one in two bold strokes. Then she draws a swoop. 

"What's that?" he asks.

"A parabola," Mal says and starts to explain.

 

* * *

 

Mal starts tutoring him in math. On one hand he doesn't like it because he hates feeling like someone knows more than he does -- on his report cards, his teachers always write "Arthur struggles with following orders" -- but on the other hand, Mal is really, really smart. He mentions it to his mom one day, but his mom says of course, she's the daughter of a professor. Except Arthur's the child of a professor too, and he's hung around professor's kids plenty of times. None of them were as smart as Mal.

Mal thinks in big, abstract brushes. She's sort of the opposite of Arthur, who thinks small and detailed. Mal doesn't talk too much either when they're not working on quadratics. In those other times, they sit together on the couch and she goes back to reading her book. 

He asks her once what her book is about, and her mouth quirks in that mysterious, oh-so-adult way before she says, "It's about homosexuals."

"Uh, what?" Arthur says.

"Don't you know about homosexuals in America?"

Arthur's red face could light the Louvre.

"You know," Mal says thoughtfully. "I've changed my mind. You're kind of cute."

"No, I'm not," Arthur argues, but it's a lost cause. Mal beams at him.

 

* * *

 

"Why is your name Mal?" Arthur asks her, chewing the end of his pencil as he goes through the exercise book she's given him; one of her own throwaways, she says. "I mean, doesn't Mal mean evil in French?"

_"Les Fleurs du Mal_," she intones.

"Why would your parents name you that?" Arthur adds, a little meanly, "Maybe they don't love you that much." It's his revenge for Mal calling him a dunderhead the other day when he didn't understand factorization.

"My parents love me," she replies evenly. "At least, my father does."

"Oh," says Arthur, and wants to ask more, wants it so much.

But Mal kicks back her chair and puts her bare feet on the table -- she's growing more comfortable in Arthur's home, this is a sign -- and says, "Who said Mal was my real name?"

"So it's a nickname?" he says. "No offense but that's even worse."

"If someone else called me that, yes. But I chose it for myself." She peers at him. He wonders if she's near-sighted. "Do you know what my father does for a living?"

"He's an architecture professor. Just like my dad."

"Not just like your dad," Mal says. She takes a spinning top out of her pocket. Arthur has seen her do this before; it's like a nervous habit. "But you're just a kid. What would you know?"

"I'll know as much as you tell me," Arthur retorts.

Mal gets up suddenly from the table. She walks over to him and she's taller than he is at this point in their lives, taller and more imposing and furiously beautiful like a medieval angel. He swallows a lump in his throat. "If you want," he adds weakly.

And Mal says, "Look, Arthur." It's the first time she's ever called him by name. "It's not a coincidence that out of all the people in Paris, I'm the one who's babysitting for you, okay?"

"I don't understand," Arthur says.

Mal looks at him, and he sees the fury that rests in her bones -- too much fury for one teenage girl. But she goes around the table and sits back down again, making herself small once more, a small body with mussed hair and badly applied makeup. Arthur walked by her high school last week, trying to find new routes home, and he saw her standing alone in the yard when everybody else was chatting in circles. He thought about saying hi then, but then he thought that it'd probably embarrass both of them. He regrets it now.

Mal taps the edge of her top against the table. It makes a hard sound. "What do you dream about?" she asks, and it's this strange but innocent question that will jump start the rest of Arthur's life.

 

* * *

 

He doesn't know what he's being trained for because unlike the math, Mal never explains. But he does know that it involves her father and high-end research, and that his own parents have no clue. Mal gives him an out at the very beginning. "I'm not supposed to," she says, "but Jesus, you're so young." When he asks her how young she was when she started training, she evades the question. "It's different for me," she says. 

Arthur wonders how he's supposed to say yes or no to a question he doesn't understand. But he's in a new city in a new continent, far away from the friends he grew up with, and nothing these days interests him half as much as Mal -- awkward Mal, bookish Mal, scabs on her knees and scars on her elbows Mal, Mal who laughs at his awful cooking but can burn soup, Mal who knows everything, Mal who looks in the mirror sometimes and seems afraid.

She writes the quadratic formula on his hand.

She shows him how to draw mazes.

She takes him to the library and introduces him to the methods of research.

She takes him to the park and introduces him to people watching.

She makes him read the newspaper for political events.

She helps him buy his first suit.

She drills French into him.

She climbs into his window one night, wakes him up with a jolt, and says, "If you tell anyone about this, I'll never talk to you again." Then she leads him out of the flat and into a taxi where they drive to a shooting range and she puts a gun in his hand.

She says, "Write down every dream you have, even the bad ones." She pauses and looks wistful. "Especially the bad ones."

 

* * *

 

She says to him one day, when they've finished cleaning the dishes, "Don't let this inflate your head, Arthur, but I think you'll make my dad and the rest of the researchers very proud."

He grins. "Am I even better than you are?"

"No," she says. "No one is as good as I am."

"Come on! And you say _my _head is inflated?"

She flicks water at him. "I told you, it's not the same. You're going to be fantastic. But I was the very first. I was the prototype. Everything the rest of you do -- you and whatever idiots are being trained over at Cobol -- is always going to be measured against me."

Arthur frowns. "That sucks."

Mal is quiet. Then she says, "That's what my mother said too."

 

* * *

 

Then Mal stops coming over. When he calls her -- and they've gotten to the point where he has her phone number now, but not her address -- she sounds muffled and tired. "I'm not feeling well," she says. "Sorry." He accepts that excuse with a sense of disappointment and spends the evening working on his book of mazes alone while his temporary babysitter, a young guy down the street, watches sports on TV and seems utterly immune to the resentful looks Arthur throws at his streaked blond head.

But Mal gets sick the next time, and the next. Then finally Arthur's father comes home shaking his head and musing, "Honey, did the Barrineaus move and not tell us?"

"What do you mean?" Arthur's mom replies, and Arthur freezes over his smuggled copy of Genet.

"I mean that Miles' office and lab are empty, and when I went over to their place, a stranger answered the door." Arthur's father looks at him, sprawled out on the floor. "Did Mal ever mention this to you?"

"No," Arthur says, and his tongue feels heavier than wrought silver.

He's jittery throughout dinner. He kicks the table leg accidentally and apologizes. He doesn't eat his peas. When he's excused, he goes to his room and waits for ten minutes. He knows his parents will watch a movie and turn up the sound. Then he opens his window and slides down the railings. It's raining and the water makes his hands slide on the metal, and the fear of falling sends his heart thrusting up to his throat, but he makes it safely to the ground and then bounds off to two blocks to the east where there is an ancient bird feeder hanging off someone's front porch. 

("If anything ever happens to me," Mal said).

There's absolutely nothing inside.

 

* * *

 

However, in his bilingual copy of _La Chanson de Roland_, which he is reading for extra credit at school, he finds that someone has underlined a phrase in the opening passage. The book is new. It has never been owned by anyone but him.

_Mur ne citet n'i est remes a fraindre._

But it's in Old French, and Mal never got around to teaching him Old French. So like everything else of hers that she's left behind -- a pair of socks under his bed, an extra holster stuffed in his bookcase -- it's just a washed up fragment of unintelligibility. 

 

* * *

 

**Coda:**

When Arthur is fourteen, there are layoffs at the university so his family moves back to San Francisco. Yichang seems happy to see him but he has different friends now and all they talk about are girls and gangster rap. Jenny still won't look at him; she's dating one of the boys from the school band. Arthur feels mistaken in his own skin. 

But his teachers never again write on his report cards, "Arthur struggles with following orders."

 

* * *

 

His parents die in a car crash when he turns sixteen.

He's certain it's not an accident.

He doesn't sleep for a month. He certainly doesn't dream. Against the social worker's firm suggestions, he drops out of school and gets a job sweeping the floor at an Italian restaurant where it's said the mafia does business. Arthur doesn't care. There are arguments sometimes and loud exchanges that frighten the other employees, but Arthur knows how to shoot and even better, he knows how to remember inconsequential details that everyone else will forget. He's been trained. For what, he still doesn't know, but he hears whispers sometimes about dream extraction, and he wonders.

Then one day a man and a woman enter the restaurant near closing time. They slide into a booth, and because the real waiters are busy snorting crack in the kitchen, they send Arthur to take their orders. The couple is young, and the woman is wearing a large-brimmed hat that hides her eyes. But when Arthur asks them quietly but politely what they would like to order, the woman pushes up her hat and smiles. 

Arthur stares.

"Miss me?" Mal asks lightly.

"Where the hell did you go?" he asks.

"There were enemies," she says, exchanging a look with her partner. Then she smiles again. She seems so much older now, more self-assured. "But I had a dream about this, Arthur. Meeting you again." She reaches across the table and touches the skin on top of his hands. Arthur swallows at the tenderness. Not since his parents, he thinks. There will be a day when he is colder and harder to reach, but today is not that day.

"It was a good dream," Mal says.


End file.
